Pat Maginess: Private-Eye

I think he also said something similar that I was reading, that it was the beginning of the book that sold the book, but the end of the book that sold the NEXT book.

He was a very commercial writer and made no bones about it. That's to his credit, I think, inasmuch as he didn't put on any airs. He was a "writer" and not an "author." He was proud of the number of books he had sold. He believed that people if they bought and liked his books that it was proof that the book had something to it.

Elmore Leonard said of him...

"Mickey Spillane, whose vigilante hero Mike Hammer made him the most popular writer in America for a decade, was the toughest of them all, and perhaps the best plotter as well. He was reviled by critics for his black-and-white views of justice, but readers loved his clarity of vision..."

Time passed him by, eventually. The rough-and-tumble type of hardboiled fiction that he was able to write and sell in the 40s through the 60s couldn't make the transition to the the more politically correct era of the 80s plus. But every once in a while somebody would come back and do another series based on Hammer, and I guess that must have kept Spillane's "fireplace burning" -- along with investments, I would expect.

But politically correct or not, his books have been and will continue to be read. He's certainly one of the great ones.

I just ordered the 1953 Signet edition copy. I should be getting it within the next few days, so I'll let you know. Stop back in. My guess is that I will be review it too sooner or later, just bacause of Spillane's death -- might be interesting to do a kind of retrospective that way.